Python conference sessions

Blender is a 3D animation suite that excels at every part of the animation pipeline, and has found its way into Hollywood blockbusters and AAA game titles. This introductory presentation will teach you 3D pipeline in a nutshell, followed by a hands-on demo where attendees can model, sculpt and render their first 3D project.

Twitter and Google+ are examples of the highly active and popular social media scene today. Using Python, you can easily execute searches on both. All you need is a client library (easily found), and you can get going without a lot of effort!

Metaclasses are a commonly misunderstood and misrepresented topic in Python. This session will introduce metaclasses, explore the added functionality they provide, and look at some real world examples of metaclasses as we use them in server-side web development at Vizme.

Data, data everywhere, but not a structured bit. Open data is all the rage, but often this data is poorly formatted or not very accessible. This session will discuss various ways to pry open the oyster of public data.

You'll often hear that some web framework "doesn't scale". Well, it's true! Django, like all web frameworks. offers a ton of shortcuts for common cases, but as sites grow these shortcuts come at the cost of performance. However, you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater; come to this talk to hear how you can win back performance while hanging on to the framework you love.

Bring your ideas to life! Convince your boss to that open source development is faster and cheaper than the "safe" COTS solution they probably hate anyway. Let's investigate ways to get real-life, functional prototypes up with blazing speed. We'll look at and compare tools for truly rapid development including Python, Django, Flask, PHP, Amazon EC2 and Heroku.

MediaGoblin is a decentralized, extensible, and forward-looking free software media hosting system (and includes cool features like HTML5 video hosting). Hear about the state of the project, why decentralized media hosting matters, lessons learned from organizing the community, and why this is an important direction for the GNU project and free and open source software to head.

Ever wondered how you might experiment with your own syntax changes to the Python programming language? Learn about the internals of Python as I dissect the steps required to introduce a new keyword to the language.

Django is a high-level web development framework designed for rapid development of database-backed web sites. This tutorial is designed to introduce developers to Django. It will take attendees from a blank screen to a fully-functional web application. I'll cover all the basics you need to know to get started with Django.

Jython is arguably the best Python implementation to target concurrent
code. Jython has no GIL, it leverages the Java platform to provide
robust support for concurrency in its runtime, and it enables access
to a set of high-level abstractions from Java. This talk will walk
through a series of motivating examples that emphasize Java integration.

Grace Murray Hopper's famous motto, "It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission", has many useful applications -- in Python, in concurrency, in networking, as well of course as in real life. However, it's not universally valid. This talk explores both useful and damaging applications of this principle.

Are you a woman wanting to break into the engineering field? Or do you know any women wanting to learn how to code, but don't know how to help them? Perhaps our nerdy ladies are a bit shy to ask for help. That's okay! I'll give you some tools to nudge you in the right direction.

An update from last year's well-received public service talk, we'll discuss the evolution of Python & answer common FAQs. There are those who worry that Python 3 is backwards-incompatible to Python 2. We address that issue, discuss what the main differences are, mention migration, the roles of 2.6/2.7 & other transition tools, and conclude with an update on what has been & yet needs to be ported.

This session provides an overview of PostgreSQL 9.1 Foreign Data Wrappers, a mechanism for retrieving data from remote data sources. We will contrast the native C interface with the Python interface provided via the Multicorn project. A real-world example will retrieve business data from salesforce.com and combine it with data held in native PostgreSQL tables using a simple SQL JOIN.

Google makes extensive use of open source software in running Google - both making use and contributing back to that. By using and contributing to open source software, we have been able to fundamentally change how managing an enterprise-size work force and their computing needs.

Artist, programmer, entrepreneur and activist Bassam Kurdali on the non-traditional URCHN.ORG animation studio, the Tube Open Movie, F/LOSS for independent filmmaking, art work and doing business in the commons.